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Some pro-life philosophers have argued that if one accepts abortion, one should accept infanticide. Prabhpal Singh has proposed a symmetry breaker. He argues that the parent–child relationship can only be obtained between born humans and such a relationship entails that infanticide is wrong. I consider this account and argue that not only is its central claim, that only born humans can stand in a parent–child relationship, unmotivated, but even if accepted, it would still not explain why infanticide is wrong.

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Some of the most widely accepted arguments in favour of abortion seem to undermine the view that infanticide is impermissible. In this paper, I outline a proposal that addresses this issue, arguing that the impermissibility of infanticide can be defended in a way that is consistent with traditional arguments in favour of abortion. I argue that killing an infant would violate its bodily rights, and so there are strong presumptive reasons against infanticide. I further argue that fetuses do not have bodily rights, and so these same reasons cannot be used to defend the impermissibility of abortion. To support this argument, I first suggest some ways in which killing someone requires violating their bodily rights. I then argue that bodily rights begin at birth, and so infants have bodily rights, but fetuses do not. When taken together with the traditional arguments in favour of abortion, this proposal suggests an important result in the abortion debate: there are philosophical grounds for defending both the permissibility of abortion and the impermissibility of infanticide.

James Robinson defends the claim that abortion and infanticide are morally distinct. This claim is defensible, he argues, because we have good reasons to condemn infanticide that do not apply to abortion. Specifically, Robinson claims that infanticide involves violation of infants’ bodily rights. Abortion does not involve the violation of fetuses’ bodily rights, however, because fetuses do not have bodily rights. Here, I offer a response. Robinson provides two reasons for thinking that fetuses lack bodily rights: (1) they do not possess bodies of their own and (2) we have clear duties to infants—which seemingly implies that infants have rights—whereas the same duties do not apply to fetuses. Robinson’s first claim, that fetuses do not possess bodies of their own, rests on a mistaken view of the metaphysics of pregnancy (ie, the ‘parthood view’). Further, Robinson assumes that to have bodily rights, one must be functionally independent from others’ bodies. I argue that this is false. Second, I argue that the same duties listed by Robinson—which he claims apply to infants—apply to fetuses too. By Robinson’s own lights, therefore, we should conclude that fetuses (like infants) have bodily rights. Alternatively, we would have to explain the wrongness of harming fetuses along some other lines (ie, in a way that does not posit fetal rights). This would be unjustifiably ad hoc. Hence, Robinson fails to provide compelling reasons to support the claim that abortion and infanticide are morally distinct.

Holt argues against my account of the moral disanalogy between the situation of a pregnant person having an abortion and a parent committing the infanticide of their newborn. I explain that this critique fails because Holt constructs a straw man of my account by misrepresenting its scope, misrepresents one of my arguments and presents false equivalences between both, withdrawing consent for sex and withdrawing from parenthood, and the relationship between a homeowner and their property and the relationship between a parent and their child, which demonstrates misunderstandings of the notions of parenthood, obligation and consent.

Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. We respond to those philosophers who accept infanticide by putting forth a novel account of how the mindless can be wronged which serves to distinguish morally significant potential from morally irrelevant potential. This allows our account to avoid the standard objection that many entities possess a potential for personhood which we are intuitively under no obligation to further or protect.

The active withdrawal of life-prolonging medical care (an intentional act that kills, even if not necessarily with the intention to kill) is a standard part of medical practice in relation to people who experience severe disability and suffering, including newborns. [...]their argument can cut both ways-I understand that one relatively common response amongst the online community was to assume the paper was written from a pro-life perspective as a reductio ad absurdum of the permissibility of abortion.) Giubilini and Minerva's paper was handled by Associate Editor Professor Ken Boyd, a distinguished theologian and medical ethicist with over 10 years editorial experience with the Journal.

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of infanticide, or by separating the way the permissibility of abortion is justified from the way the impermissibility of infanticide is justified. My argument is that none of these ways justifies the abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome while simultaneously rejecting infanticide. Either the justification for abortion is consistent with infanticide, or it is implausible to justify abortion while rejecting infanticide. I conclude the article by making some preliminary remarks about how one might manage the situation posed by my argument.

When writing about policy, do you think in green or white? If not, I recommend that you do. I suggest that writers and journal editors should explicitly label every policy ethics paper either ‘green’ or ‘white’. A green paper is an unconstrained exploration of a policy question. The controversial ‘After-birth abortion’ paper is an example. Had it been labelled as ‘green’, readers could have understood what Giubilini and Minerva explained later: that it was a discussion of philosophical ideas, and not a policy proposal advocating infanticide. A serious policy proposal should be labelled by writer(s) and editor(s) as ‘white’. Its purpose should be to influence policy. In order to influence policy, I suggest three essential, and two desirable, characteristics of any white paper. Most importantly, a white paper should be set in the context in which the policy is to be made and applied.